The present invention relates to a belt used for manufacturing a non-woven fabric.
Conventionally, non-woven fabrics have been formed by depositing a fiber assembly onto a mesh carrier belt such as plain woven fabrics and the applying highly pressurized water or hot air to the fiber assembly deposited on the belt to entangle or weld the fibers together to thereby form the non-woven fabric.
It is desirable to form irregular patterns in non-woven fabric in order to provide improved touch and feel properties to the fabric, however, according to the conventional mesh belt, it is impossible to obtain irregular patterns providing a sufficient touch and feel, since the irregularity is provided only by the difference in height between knuckles of weft and warp thereby limiting the irregularity. Therefor, it has been impossible to form a sufficient irregularity only by the fabric of the belt.
Recently, it has been desired to add design patterns such as letters, numbers or characters on a non-woven fabric for the purpose of providing enhanced value to the fabric, but according to the conventional mesh belt, the formation of the patterns was restricted by the textile design of the belt fabric itself so that it was difficult to provide different formations with design patterns and irregular patterns with free formations independent of the configuration of the underlying carrier belt.